SOA and the Data Centre

I was at an update on data centre strategies last week, covering such topics as virtualization and the concept of a shared IT infrastructure. The thought occurred to me that actually there are a lot of synergies between data centre and SOA strategies.

It may seem bizarre to be linking what is essentially a software architecture from the world of applications and user programs with an area more concerned with hardware efficiency and utilization, power consumption and resource provisioning, but in fact these two areas have a lot of similarities. In essence, the shared IT infrastructure concept is about using data centre resources more efficiently. SOA is about using application and program resources more efficiently.

In fact, I believe that these data centre initiatives may be useful in addressing a potential future problem as SOA rollouts gather speed and become more extensive - the provisioning of SOA services. For anyone interested, there is a Lustratus Insight discussing the topic of SOA and the data centre in more detail, although I am afraid this is not one of our free papers.

It will be interesting to see how this develops, but it seems to me that companies that are really serious about SOA should start thinking about this subject now, in order to gain future advantage.

Steve